4. The Tapes

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Something rather strange happened while I was doing some research for the podcast at Cambridge University. Let me get my notes. Just before leaving, I wanted to double-check something with a head archivist. I knocked on his office door, and asked him if he'd shown me everything he had on the Bengal famine. He tapped his fingers on his desk, then reached across the piles of books and papers. He's just given me this tiny box containing 10 microcosets, and these are all interviews that were conducted in the 80s by Dr. L Brennan, Hove South Australia. Along the spine of each cassette, a name's written in tiny letters. God knows how long they've been sitting on his desk for decades by the look of it, and I've been given a dictaphone, and I think we may even be the first people to be listening to them. I don't know who the tape doesn't get you now. Yes, right relief work under A.O. kind of squire. The tapes are a treasure trove. There's about 50 now's worth of material on them, recorded by historian Lance Brennan. Well, I was born in Furt in Western Australia, but I teach now in Adelaide. He spent a few weeks in India and Bangladesh interviewing Indian civil servants, part of the colonial administration during the famine. What's extraordinary is that these men worked on the ground right across Bengal, so you get a real sense of what the authorities were doing about the crisis or not. I hadn't heard about interviews like this before. It felt like a big deal, but I wanted to know if it really was, so I played some of them to historian Janam Mukherjee, who documented in forensic detail what happened during the Bengal famine. I mean, have you come across this kind of interview for people? No, zero. I haven't even heard of any such archive. You know, it's one thing what Vaisroya is saying, and the secretary of state is saying, but particularly when you follow the colonial chain down to the local level, is super important to understanding what happened. It's really, really interesting, and I'm just wondering what the, you know, how I get all of those hands off. As autumn of 1943 approached, people around the world knew about the famine, largely because of those photos printed in the statesmen. What was happening in Bengal could no longer be suppressed, and yet relief was still not widely available. Can these recordings offer clues as to why more wasn't done in time? The voices on those cassettes, like nearly all of the first hand testimonies in this series, have never been broadcast before. I'm Kavita Puri, and for BBC Radio 4 in the World Service, this is 3 million. Episode 4. The tapes. The tapes are old-school, each one fits snugly into the palm of my hand. When I first listen, they're a bit of a mystery, and the sound is often terrible. But gradually I feel I get to know more about lance. For starters, he really likes tea. I just have black tea, something about Bung with eshi tea, it's nice and strong. I've had so much tea since I didn't eat lean darker. And as he travels across Bengal, fuelled by cups of tea, I feel like I'm traveling with him. What we have here is on Hara Bridge in a taxi. There are two buses, one of which is running into a big truck carrying loads of lime. We're now trying to get out. The tapes can be frustrating. There are moments when I'm desperate to reach back in time and push the recorder closer to the interviewees. But as I listen, I begin to piece together what lance is looking at. He's asking about relief efforts, and there's something that keeps coming up. It's called the famine code. I look it up. It was first written by the British in the late 19th century, laying out what it called indicators, basically tests to determine if there was a famine, and if there was, what steps to take to alleviate it. And yet despite a system being in place, the overriding sense the interviewees give is of us a chaos. In those first months, the crisis from late 1942 and into 1943, what was unfolding was on a scale that officials had never dealt with before. This is Kazi Huck, who was working in West Bengal. These recordings are 40 years old, so the sound isn't great. Femin always gave a signal with Femin's coming. But here was the emergency situation because we started your footing. We didn't know equal. It never happened even when nobody knew what to do and what was happening where, where was the shortage. Communication was very, very strong. He says there was confusion and a situation unlike any he had ever seen. Indian civil servants like Kazi were sending reports about the escalating crisis to their British officers, yet remarkably, even though famine would later be widely reported in the press, it was never officially declared in Calcutta or Delhi. Historian Janam Mukherjee. Every indicator of that code had been met, so Femin should have been declared. It essentially wasn't declared because of the war. If famine had been declared, the Imperial government would have had to send food to the countryside. But that would mean reducing supply to those working in the war effort. The idea of declaring famine officially would put certain imperial responsibilities on Britain that they simply did not want to meet, they did not want to have to set up the resources that were indicated in the famine code, which would mean imperial aid. So that's a huge, you know, disincentive to declare famine. And as I start going through more of the tapes, I notice something really strange. The final way for the civil servants to detect if there was a famine was extraordinarily draconian. Again and again, they talk about having to carry out something called test works, essentially giving food relief to hungry people, but only in exchange for work. On the fourth tape I listened to, I find Saeed who's saying one of those setting up test works. Were you involved in any of the test works that were set up for those who were strong enough? Can you recall what sort of work was being done for them, work works, raising roads? What's the other one? This one was the second note there. You should just give them so what? Just to give them. And they were so poor, they were so eagerly weak. They couldn't move. It seems a bizarre test for famine to get people to work for food, especially when they were already weak and exhausted. I think that that was established in the poor houses of England long before the Bengal famine, as well as in response to the Irish famine. That idea of the workhouse as a form of famine relief. The idea that people need to earn their keep, so if we hand out charity that will disable people, right? A deserving poor. Right. As Lance comes to the end of his interviews, He realises that if he moves the mic closer to his interviewees, their voices will come through clearer. "I leave that there, pointed to you. My boy comes through very clearly, because I think about it." "Yeah." "It's a good job," he moved the mic closer to his saint Halokdha, as he holds one of the most interesting roles of the people interviewed. Based in West Bengal, he reported to a really important figure, the British colonial officer in charge of food supply around Bengal. And yet, despite his position, Halokdha describes inexperience and a lack of preparation. "The thing came like a board from the bling, there was a semi, it was a thing that we had no experience, I mean, achieving supplies and so on." Halokdha clearly liked his British seniors, and remember, he's part of the colonial administration, which makes what he says about priorities all the more extraordinary. "The Japanese invasion had obsessed these people, it was from the top, everything was subordinated to the necessities of the world, and they had removed the boats, so the crops could have moved from one place to another, and what is to be done or not to be done was dictated by the high covent, their debilitary people." Fighting the war and keeping the Japanese out of British India, he says, took priority over feeding the hungry masses. This is the moment where I'd love to bring you lunch today to talk about his tapes. He's 84 and living in Australia. He's been emailing back and forth with the team for months and helping us with the background of the tapes, but then he stopped responding. He mentioned a family member was ill, and I didn't want to bother him. His tapes show in action when there should have been action. Colonial authorities had made rules for detecting and preventing a famine in India, but in the middle of a war, they didn't follow them. And while relief efforts struggled in Bengal, requests for more help from London were still not being fully heated. By autumn 1943, the world knew about the extent of famine in Bengal, but the war cabinet, chaired by Winston Churchill, had promised only a fraction of the aid asked for, saying there was not enough shipping space because of the war. The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amry, recorded in his diary in September. Churchill was prepared to admit that something should be done, but very strong on the point that Indians are not the only people starving in the war. Amry goes on, Churchill thought that, quote, "the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks." I'm Max Hastings. I'm the author of some 30 books, which more than a few are about the Second World War. It seems to me you can't possibly deny that Churchill was racist. Max Hastings is one of Britain's preeminent historians on the Second World War and Winston Churchill. I think he's contribution to mankind in delivering us from the menace of Nazism and fascism around the world, bait him, somebody that we should be grateful to. But on the other hand, he saw Indians, yes, as a sort of subspecies, he certainly didn't regard them as the equivalent of white men. He was a man of his time, he was a Victorian, and yes, we're shocked by the way that they thought. But this was his mindset when he approached the issue of the Bengal famine. I mean, you say we're shocked now, was he racist for his time? Even by the standard of that time, quite a lot of the people around Churchill, including Leo Amry, his India Secretary, were shocked, but even a historian such as me who admire Churchill boundlessly is still sometimes shocked by reading some of the phrases that Churchill used in those days. The Second Half of the War, the issue of shipping was absolutely fundamental to the whole war effort. So Churchill was not inventing the fact that shipping was a huge constraint on operations. It's just that some of us do not believe that the interests of the war effort would have been disastrously compromised by diverting some shipping to Bengal relief supplies, and we would argue that should have been done. Do you think that Churchill's attitudes towards Indians did that affect his response to imports? The numerous requests for imports. Perhaps the ugliest side of Churchill's character was his ruthlessness towards subject races. He always regarded the empire as subordinate subsidiary to the British homeland. There was a consistent pattern of callousness in the approach of the home government, in particular Winston Churchill, to what happened. And I want to keep saying as a mantra that this does not diminish my admiration for Churchill, but all realistic historians and biographers of Churchill must recognize this very large blot on his record. This is coming from a historian who admires Churchill and is overall record during the war, but it's a live debate, some defend Churchill's actions in the middle of a war, but others go much further in criticising the wartime Prime Minister for not intervening more to save lives. Superman who back in October 1943 became the new viceroy of India. Field Marshal Lord Wavel has abandoned military command to fill the all important office of viceroy of India at a time when nobody in the world would envy him his tremendous responsibility. In a newsreel recorded by Reuters, Churchill's new appointment as viceroy to coffees, Lord Wavel. The reason for his visit to Calcutta at this time was the appalling condition of famine in the province. With his stiff white suit, he looked like what he was, a former commander in chief of India. But unlike his predecessor as viceroy, he actually went to visit the famine stricken areas. He was shocked by what he saw, writing in his journal that the situation was grim enough to make official complacency surprising. He quickly authorised the full use of military resources for famine relief into the countryside. The British relief effort had been painfully slow. Now Wavel was trying to act quickly and save lives. Wavel does also act of his own volition and kind of motivation to establish a far-reaching and well-resourced relief operation in Bengal at large, including packing rice into remote villages with donkeys, using the entire military apparatus to try to get rice into the furthest reaches of Bengal. Wavel's motivations are authentically humanitarian. I mean, he does see the starvation of Bengal as something that needs to be stemmed, not simply for political purposes or military purposes, but because it is an injustice and Asian humanitarian catastrophe. Military units were redirected to administer relief in Bengal. Wavel introduced more relief hospitals and rural kitchens. He ensured Delhi was now committed to feeding Calcutta and the war effort from outside the province, no longer relying on Bengal's rural areas. There were prominent voices in Westminster supporting Wavel's humanitarian approach. Lord Pethic Lawrence, leading the first parliamentary debate on the famine, said in November 1943, "If this terrible death rate had occurred in any one part of the British Isles, parliamentarians would have been viciferous in demanding that something should be done." What he was asking was, with starving Britons, had been treated in the same way. A few days later, the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amri, asked for more food imports, noting in his diary, he says Churchill broke into a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits. His request for immediate imports were denied. In the relief effort faced another major obstacle. After Wavel's intervention, more food relief was coming into Bengal from other parts of India, but it didn't always reach those who desperately needed it. And this powerful piece of testimony also does. discovered at Cambridge University, Gurdiel Kostler, a traffic superintendent, in charge of the railway district in Dakar in East Bengal, remembers what happened in the months after Wavel arrived. - I was intimately connected with receiving the food drains into Dhaka, and naturally I was also concerned that they disposal from railway premises. But I found that disposal was so tardy that the railway stations were getting filled up, and there were stacks of gunny bags full of wheat mounting up in various parts of the stations, not only on the platforms, but also the whatever available space they were between railway tracks, and a situation arose where the place was absolutely joked, and nothing more could be received in Dhaka. I will therefore force to imposing a restriction on the booking of food grains into Dhaka, and East Bengal generally. - People were starving in East Bengal, and yet Kostler says he had to stop new grain deliveries coming in. - It was a dismal failure because if those food grains had not been allowed to accumulate in Dhaka, and had been distributed to the countryside, possibly where many deaths could have been saved. - For historian Janam Mukherjee, the ineptitude is a reflection of a colonial project in its twilight years. - What is interesting in the Bengal famine is that it also really reveals the scleradic nature of the colonial state by its end, by the 1940s. So the incapacities of the colonial system are glaring in relation to the famine. The failure of vision, the failure of administration, it was a state in collapse. The officers of the colonial state were demoralized. They were facing a festive population that did not want them there. At home, their own families were facing bombings, and their home country was under attack by Nazi Germany. You had demoralized also colonial officers, fleeing the defeats in Singapore and Burma, and flooding into Calcutta. The picture of colonialism by the 1940s is very much a dying colonialism, and I think the Bengal famine can also be seen as part of the death throes of that colonial state. (gentle music) - The rice harvest came at the end of 1943. This time, it was plentiful. Even so, Wavel was concerned about a second famine. He demanded over a million tons of food grain. In a cable to Wavel, Churchill said, "We have given a great deal of thought to your difficulties, but we simply cannot find the shipping." There were allied plans for the Normandy landings. Wavel didn't let up. In a very strongly worded telegram to London on February 19th, 1944, Wavel said the Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters that had been fallen any people under British rule and damaged to our reputation is incalculable. Only in April 1944 did Churchill ask for help from America. Churchill wrote to US President Roosevelt asking for assistance that they declined. They needed their ships for the D-Day landings. By the end of the year, nearly 18 months after Ian Stevens his pictures in the statesmen and after a famine commission had been appointed to examine what had gone wrong, Wavel's request of a million tons of aid was granted in full. It was too late for the millions who had already died. This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. The end of the war in Europe was officially announced by Mr. Churchill at three o'clock this afternoon in a broadcast from 10 Downing Street. "Ostilates will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight, but in the interest of saving lives the ceasefire began yesterday to be founded along all the front." Tuesday, 8 May 1945, V.E. Day. "Well, back here at Piccadilly, it's still the same old story. There's still a terrific throng of people. A few moments ago, some members of the Royal Navy showed that their training hasn't been misspent as they shinnyed up like monkeys up the lamp standards and planted firmly the Union Jack, the Russian flag, and the stars and stripes. A few more months later, there was a terrific flashback." In the crowd, there was jubilation. "Well, today we've had a really stupid day, we had pictures of them cast at birth, dinner and cream cakes for tea, we're quite overwhelmed." "That's a very good celebration." It was a day of celebration in Britain, but in India, still a colony, the victory rang hollow. Historian Max Hastings. "It's very easy to understand why host of people, especially in Britain's Asian empire, were pretty doubtful whether they were all going to wave their flags, their union flags on VE Day, when what were they securing on VE Day? Freedom from what? They were not securing the freedom they really wanted for their countries from the British Empire." VE Day. It's such an iconic day apart of our national story, but something else happened on that day that we don't remember. On this day of all days, the famine commission published its findings. The inquiry largely blamed the provincial government for shortage in the rice harvest and inflation. It barely got a mention in the British press. Maybe that's what set the tone for silence about the famine. In Churchill's six volume autobiography of his wartime premiership, the Bengal famine, which occupied many war cabinet discussions, is absent, so too, is the famine commission report. We still don't talk much about it here. Perhaps that's not surprising. Who wants to talk about the most difficult parts of our colonial history, especially when it complicates how we remember our role in the war? The Second World War remains the greatest single event in human history. So it's hardly surprising first that the British people continue to take pride in the fact that our ancestors were on the winning side and on the whole did extraordinarily well. And secondly, that it was probably the last time that Britain played a really important role on the world stage. So if we're going to bask in, as we're entitled to bask in, all the triumphs of the Spitfires and the Hurricanes and Winston Churchill and all the heroes and the great events in which we can take pride from the Second World War, then we also shouldn't be afraid to look on the blemishes and in some cases the huge blemishes of which the Bengal famine is probably the most conspicuous. 80 years on, there are conversations about history that we still need to have in Britain. But what about in India and Bangladesh? We don't have a plaque to the three million who died. But why doesn't Bengal? One man armed with pen and notebook is trying to change how the famine is remembered in India by finding the last remaining survivors in rural Bengal. They're in their 90s, even older. It's a race against time. Now the people of Bengal want to forget their history. When you want to forget your history, you want to forget everything. I find him next on three million. Hi, I'm Mariana Spring, the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent. And I've learned first hand that the online world can be a breeding ground for hate. But why do some people behave the way they do on social media? For BBC Radio 4, I'm meeting the people at the heart of some extraordinary online complex to see if understanding even forgiveness is ever possible. Listen to why do you hate me on BBC Sounds. This is going to revolutionise astronomy. It could be real exciting for the astronomical community, I guess, in the whole world to see what trouble really can do. From the BBC World Service, 13 minutes travel with Hubble, the story of the Hubble Space Telescope. Listen now on BBC.com, the BBC app, or whatever you get to your BBC podcasts.